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I was a Christian. I didn't want to have sex before marriage, I was a bit uptight and not very self-confident. I was a virgin until I was 26.
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You never want to be the grumpy guy, although I do have quite a grumpy face.
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TV's not the same buzz. If someone tells you three million people watched the show last week, that's good but, when you walk out in front of 1,000, you think, 'Oh my God, this had better be good'.
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I was in love with the idea of being in love with a woman way before I was actually in love with one.
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I like to write a joke without any fat on it. The shorter the better. I cater for people with ADD, basically.
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I think being successful in comedy is being funny and making jokes - anything beyond that is the icing on the cake.
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If I'm at home for the weekend - and that is almost never - I tend to get twitchy at about eight o'clock in the evening because my body clock is timed to go on stage. I don't know what to do with myself.
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It's so clear cut with a comedian - you have that reflex action, whereby you laugh or you don't. And so you either love us or you simply cannot see why people are laughing.
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If only Africa had more mosquito nets then every year we could save millions of mosquitoes from dying needlessly of aids.
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I think that comedians, more than any other type of celebrity, have to keep their humour and keep their feet on the ground. If they start taking themselves too seriously, they're heading for a fall.
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Even if you're doing the national insurance awards, there's still that excitement when you wonder who is going to win, er, best premiums.
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After a gig I always head back to the hotel, remembering granny's words of wisdom. I cancel the late-night pizza and watch the Jonathan Ross show instead.
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There's things that I couldn't joke about but other people could.
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It is such a social thing, laughing. Two thousand people in a room laughing is such a great buzz and they tend to laugh much more in a group.
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I did quite a lot of TV shows over the latter half of 2004 - all those 100 Greatest and 100 Worst and all that kind of stuff. So I was a little bit overexposed. But I think you need to do that once in your career, and that's how you become famous. You get overexposed once, and then people know your name and you can relax a bit.
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Women were quite terrifying until I was older. I think that's partly down to confidence.
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As soon as I did my first five minutes of stand-up I knew that I would rather be a failure at comedy than a success in marketing.
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Staying in luxury hotels still gives me a kick, especially Oulton Hall in Yorkshire. I'd stay in a hotel for the breakfast and room service.
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I don't think it's any coincidence that I lost my religious faith and 'manned up' in the same year. I was described somewhere as a lapsed Catholic, which is funny because I'm not going back! I want to achieve things rather than live life in an animalistic way.
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A surprising amount of my jokes sound very implausible but are true.
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To me, my approach is the most sensible. You're a comic. Therefore you want to get laughs. How do you get the most laughs in an hour? Tell short jokes. And don't say boom boom at the end. Just let the audience laugh then tell another joke. It's the shortest route to where you want to go.
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More people are going out to comedy shows than they were before.
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The tragedy for comedians is there's nothing more they want than to be liked. We desperately seek approval. It's almost like a personality disorder you can do as a job.
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I'm obsessed with TV. How wrong our parents were when they said we should only watch an hour a day. Stop wasting your time reading books.